The present invention relates generally to an improved billing and contract management method and a computerized system, and more specifically to software and a method for providing additional billing and management functionality and processing of rent-producing financial products, such as contracts and leases that are past the initial end term date and that have not been renegotiated or extended, or, in other words, that have entered the “evergreen” period. In particular, the present invention relates to the software that provides and incorporates the processing of the financial products (e.g., operating, direct finance, asset sales and sales type leases and loans) in the “evergreen” period with proprietary software products such as Oracle™ E-Business suite's Lease Management system and allows seamless integration with Oracle and other software contract management products and methods.
In today's competitive technological marketplace, computerized systems and proprietary software (a.k.a. an enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications) are used to track and manage a number of different financial and asset-based products, such as commercial leases and other types of rent-generating contracts. Most ERP systems track and manage only a limited aspect of a business agreement or a particular type of transaction, but some offer a more global approach, allowing a user to track the contractual arrangement and business transactions pursuant to this arrangement from sales and contract origination to the end term of the contractual agreement.
For example, Oracle™ Lease Management system and solution helps lessors manage a number of complex contractual business arrangements, such as vendor programs, operating agreements, investor agreements and other types of contracts with sufficient automation and flexibility necessary for operations in a global enterprise marketplace. Among other things, it helps lessors to account for transactions according to standards that may vary from one region to another, comply with evolving regulations, streamline and automate end-to-end business process to improve efficiencies and reduce costs by reducing traditionally labor-intensive processes such as contract authoring, review and approval, management of the transactions in multiple currencies, billing, funding, collections, insurance and contract termination.
Although Oracle's E-business suite's Lease Management software provides an improvement over prior lease management software products and ERPs that were specific to the requirements of a particular country and did not interface with other similar systems selected by the affiliates in other countries, Oracle's unified software solution and method for automating the end-to-end business processes is still deficient in a number of important aspects. It only has extremely limited functionality relating to automated processing, billing and accounting for the contracts in the “evergreen” period. The lease contract period for these contracts may have reached its term date, but the rents are still being collected and the contract is neither renegotiated, extended, or rebooked. Therefore, there exists a need for, among other goals and solutions, for a software system and a method of processing the “evergreen” contracts and integrating their processing with such contract management functions as authoring and booking, processing, billing, accounting, collections, modification of the terms and conditions and audit trailing of these modification in the ERP systems currently utilized by lessors.